Secret Intelligence, the Special Services and Intrigue 1900-1953

McKay’s Notes on the Case of Raoul Wallenberg

My work on Raoul Wallenberg has concentrated on his mission to Budapest rather than on his subsequent fate in Russia. I have chosen to examine various assertions, claims and plain simple innuendo to the effect that this mission may have involved other than purely humanitarian goals. In particular, I have looked both at possible connections with various secret services – not simply the OSS- and at possible hidden economic motives. As a result, I have investigated in some detail a string of peripheral3 figures, many of whom are hardly mentioned in more orthodox presentations of Raoul’s mission. Although I have found nothing to suggest that he acted as an important secret agent with a task radically different from his explicit humanitarian mission to aid the Jews in Hungary, I have unearthed substantial archival evidence showing that he did have interesting contacts with several people who were working for the secret services- Cheshire in Stockholm and Lolle Smit in Budapest – are two fascinating examples. But is this really surprising? As I have had occasion to remark on numerous occasions, it would have been impossible for any neutral businessmen to travel about wartime Europe without contacts with at least one secret service and more probably with several.